INASP - Branding and responsive website

Purpose

INASP is an international development charity working to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, enabling countries are equipped to solve their development challenges. They wanted to review and redefine their strategy and branding and create a new website that made it easier to find their excellent resources. Their old site included many publications and training course outlines - but they were difficult to find. They also wanted their site to work well for the increasing numbers of mobile devices that were accessing their site.

People

Clients and Partners

INASP provide training courses in writing, publishing, accessing and disseminating research. They also work with publishers to provide low or no-cost access to packages of academic journals and books. They facilitate networks of academic institutions in each country to work together on these topics and more recently have been working to get the evidence produced by research used in policy making.

Who Benefits

The site serves academic and librarian users in the network of countries that INASP work with. There are around 2000 academic institutions registered on the site across 20 partner countries and 70 network countries. Individual users can find training courses and other publications, find training events and access local networks to help them access journals, write articles and get them published.

Through the Subscribed Resources Registration System, institutions are able to register for collections of resources (journals and ebooks) provided by academic publishers. They can update their details in one central place and all publishers will be notified about the changes.

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Process

The project kicked off with two days of discovery creating key user personas, the most important user journeys and the cross-cutting priorities for the site. From this we produced the core site map and key areas of functionality. Work progressed in a series of iterations with the results being deployed to the dev and staging servers at least once per iteration. A production server was set up so that INASP could start adding content in advance of the site launch. Once the site was ready, we replaced the old site, and have continued to add new features to it since then, as and when required by INASP.

In parallel with this, logo concepts were generated. We took the preferred concept and produced a few variations of it for feedback, leading to a final logo being produced and agreed. From that point we produced the full site design and brand guidelines for both online and print materials.

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Code

Django CMS was an ideal choice to help us meet our client's needs. Built on top of the Django framework, it includes many features out of the box including multiple language support, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and front end editing. It allows INASP to add and edit pages, but also allows for extensions with plugins (that can appear within a page) and apps (a set of pages). We created custom apps for sets of items with structured data, including news, events, training courses and publications. And a large app provides the Subscribed Resources Registration System - so the code could be reused on another site.

Along the way we added some minor extensions to django tables2 that allowed tabular reports to be downloaded as CSV files. We also created django-sortable-listview - a class based view that adds sorting to the ListView.

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